• Turning a dead mall into a thriving urban center

    MidCity District in Huntsville, Alabama, is an exemplary model for suburban retrofit. Urban Design Associates won a Merit Award in the Neighborhood, District, and Corridor category of the 2026 CNU Charter Awards.
    The MidCity District replaces a 140-acre failing mall site with a block-and-street network that offers tremendous opportunities to develop valuable real estate supporting a high-quality public realm. The Huntsville, Alabama, project was designed in 2015 and adapted to changes wrought by the...Read more

  • District transformation starts with streets, blocks

    La Plaza District looks like many suburban commercial areas, but a new street plan would enable incremental change into a mixed-use, walkable downtown gateway.
    La Plaza District in Rogers, Arkansas, looks similar, in many ways, to a thousand other suburban commercial districts—situated at the crossroads of two arterial roads. Around the 8 th and Walnut streets intersection are large strip malls—including one that used to house the nation’s first Walmart—...Read more

  • New life for Savannah Legacy Project

    CNU-sponsored plan shows how Southside Savannah could grow by retroffiting an abandoned mall and other sites across from a university campus.
    The Savannah Mall redevelopment/Southside town center plan is one of the more creative CNU Legacy Projects. It envisions the redevelopment of a large indoor shopping mall and other underutilized commercial properties by applying the classic, historic patterns of Savannah, Georgia. Due to the...Read more

  • To build a center on a former mall

    A mixed-use center is the best way to maximize value from a vacant mall site, but it requires proactive city leadership, as seen in Huntsville.
    MidCity District in Huntsville, Alabama, is a 140-acre mixed-use development on the site of the former Madison Square Mall, built in 1984. As the name implies, it is centrally located to the sprawling Rocket City and its largest employment centers, about three miles west of downtown. The District...Read more